As her chance for true love grows distant and one of her little sister is diagnosed with a rare medical condition, Charity Wentworth feels like everything most precious to her is being jeopardized. She knows that God wants her to let go and just trust Him. This winter is the longest Charity can remember having lived through. As she waits for spring can Charity trust God, no matter what? ~ From back cover of No Matter What by Elisabeth Allen

We all go through hard times. Times when we ask some of the hardest questions we ever will ask about life, faith, and our calling. This second book in the Charity’s Diary series takes Charity through a hard time and addresses many of the questions we all will face at one point or another. Where is God when bad things happen? Why doesn’t he stop them? And many more.

One of my favorite things about this book is it showed how to deal with heartbreak and hard times in a godly way. Charity makes mistakes, but she is striving to do what is right. As girls, we often catch ourselves forming emotional attachments with guys that may or may not be the one God wants for us. How do we deal with that? This book is a great place to start.

I cannot say enough about this book: It was so life-like and real that I felt that I was sitting in Charity’s living room.

For my friends who don’t read romance books, I think you will love this book.

Yes, the anticipated sequel to The Destiny of One is coming soon!!! Would you like to help promote this book? My goal is to have twice as many blogs participate in this blog tour as did in The Destiny of One blog tour. Would you like to help me? Send me an e-mail or leave me a comment that you want to be part of it, and then ask a blogging friend to join the tour as well.

There are times when God seems far away, and spiritual things feel as far away as London is from San Francisco. Other times God, and spiritual truths feel only a heart beat away. These past few weeks have been a time, for me, where they feel a heartbeat away. I’d like to share with you some pictures I’ve taken and illustrate the lesson I got from them.

In Texas right now, we are in the worst drought on record. We have had less rain than we did during the Dust Bowl. As I walked, looking at the brown, powdery earth beneath my feet, a verse popped into my head;

This weekend, we got one and a half inches of rain, and life sprang forth, which got me to thinking.

If you had looked at the ground a week ago, you would have said that it was dead. Nothing living could be in that sorry looking dirt, or could it?

Christ died to plant the seed of salvation, so that all those that believe that he was raised from the dead and confess him as their Lord will be transformed like the dirt after the rain.

The past two weeks have been very hard for me. I spent three straight days with a family that lost a 13 year old son and brother, trying to offer support. I subsequently got a nasty cold, fell behind in my editing, and missed work. Not a great couple of weeks. Yet even in these bad days, there were bright spots, things to be thankful for.

#51 An amazing family

#52 A God who hold us when we are broken

#53 CharityWentworth ~ She may not be real, but she helped me thorough this hard time.

#54 Amazing, godly women who were there for me every step of the way. Late at night, early in the morning and praying for me all the time

God has blessed me with the greatest parents in the world. I am so grateful for the example they have set for me and the love they have showed me through the years. The friendship I share with both my mom and my dad is a wonderful gift that I cherish.

We can all give sermons. We all have lists of the social ills that we would like to fix. We all have causes we are passionate about, but should they be in your book? The key to not only having good lessons but lessons that people will listen to and learn from it to write from your heart, not your soap box and weaving them through the story, not dumping them into sermons.

Attitude

Are you going into a story with an axe to grind or chip on your shoulder? That will produced a story written you of frustration and anger that will more likely push people away then convict them of their sins. Examine you attitude toward the lessons you are trying to teach and make sure you are always writing out of love.

Audience

I cannot tell you how many times I have opened a book marketed to conservative Christians and/or home-schoolers and found that the book had lessons that can best be described at preaching to the choir. When you write a book, make sure you keep in mind your target audience. If you are writing to home-schoolers, they probably already know the down sides to public schools. If you are writing to girls who are planning on doing courtship, they don’t need a lecture on the issues with dating.

Sermons

In one of my favorite series of books, Secrets of Heathersleigh Hall by Michael Philips; one of the characters is a pastor and gives several sermons, which I skipped. Sermons are rarely well received in a fiction book. If people wanted to read a sermon, they would have gotten a theology book, not a fiction book. Even if you have a character who is a pastor, sermons are not wanted most of the time.

Sermons can work though. In one of my new favorite series, Charity’s Dairy by Elisabeth Allen, she has a few sermons. She makes them work by not writing out the whole sermon. You either hear the beginning or the end and it always gets Charity thinking. This is a wonderful example of sermons that work.

Moral of the Story

Let’s all get off our soap boxes and out of the pulpits when trying to conveys our lessons. We might be surprised how much more the reader listens.

The Vintage Jane Austen

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About me

Sarah Holman is a not so typical mid-twenties girl: A homeschool graduate, sister to six awesome siblings, and author of many published books and short stories. If there is anything adventuresome about her life, it is because she serves a God with a destiny bigger than anything she could have imagined.

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While not the best formatted ebook, not an exhaustive history, I really enjoyed this little book. It was a bit of history, with lots of pictures and interesting facts. I look forward to reading more in this series.

I am not going to be to harsh in this review because I didn't finish the book. I got to the chapter of bigotry and I deleted it from my Kindle? Simply put, I think that the author was unbiblical in much of what he said. The book felt lik...

Age Appropriate For: 13 and up for romance
Best for Ages: 15 and up for romance
Since I really enjoyed Duty, I jumped at the chance to review Honor. After all, I love how Rachel writes her romances. Yes, maybe there is a little more pre...